Intermittent Stuttering in Games

[Frightened_Inmate]

Hello,

This is my first post so please forgive me if I couldn't find a better place to put this. Was pointed here by a friend and it appears to be a fantastic community so far.

Anyway, I'm having a problem that involves intermittent stuttering in my games. By stuttering I mean constant Disc Access that makes all movement and shooting jerky and delayed, say in Counter-Strike. This stutter would happen as I go from area to area of the map. It is not limited to HL2. It has happened to Far Cry, FEAR and even SIMS 2.

When it happens, the game is unplayable. But it doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes (actually more often than not) the games run exactly as they should.

Here is my system:

-Intel 945GTPL LGA775
-2x512MB Corsair ValueRAM DDR2 PC4200
-Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 8mb 160GB
-EVGA 7800GT CO Factory OC'd to 470mhz
-XP SP2

When it started happening I thought a reformat and reinstall of XP would fix it, but it hasn't. I have no viruses, no spyware, no Rootkits and I turn everything off before I game. I've also cleared and then reallocated my pagefile to a fixed 2.5Gig block.

The problem with troubleshooting this is that it's completely intermittent in nature. Usually, if I restart the PC before I game, I am fine. If I game after the PC has been doing random stuff for a while like email and browsing, then it is more likely to stutter. The stuttering is also ALWAYS (in the case of Counterstrike) accompanied by uncharacteristically LONG load times. So if my level is loading twice as slow as normal, I know already that it's gonne be a stutter round.

I know for a fact it is not the videocard because I've gone through an X700Pro, then an X800XL and now the 7800GT with the same thing happening.

I really would like to get this fixed. My suspicions are that it's a software as opposed to a hardware thing, because of the fact that it runs perfectly most of the time. Could it be a program of mine causing a memory leak of sorts and my games resorting to using the pagefile as opposed to the RAM?

Please give me some ideas! Much thanks!!

Sam

P.S. The only thing I leave running is AVG Resident Shield (the control center is off) but I don't think it's that because my friends leave the same thing on with no issues.

 

[skidmarq]

One thing you might try during your troubleshooting would be to open up your Windows Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and let it run while you game.

As soon as you notice the "stuttering" occur, minimize your game and look at your Windows processes. Organize it by the processes using the highest percentage of CPU usage (just click on CPU).

Potentially there could be a process which is set to run at random intervals (spyware scans, firewall stuff)? This would be a quick and easy way to find it...

 

[TitaniumZX]

Make sure your HDD is set to UDMA Mode 4 or 5. My old Intel system defaulted to PIO for some odd reason and it ran like crap.

Make sure you have the latest chipset and video drivers. Windows update, including DirectX, wouldn't hurt.

 

[Frightened_Inmate]

skid,

Good suggestion. I'll try that next time it happens.

Titanium,

Thanks, but my HD is an SATA and Im pretty sure that doesn't apply. Latest chipset, video and Direct X. I haven't done any windows update since SP2 cause I think they do more harm than good.

 

[AuxNuke]

Sometimes Windows, as brilliant as it is, likes to do things at the most un-oportune times. 2 things that I found that eat up my HD cycles is Indexing Services and System Restore. Disabling both of these services helped clean things up a bit.

Just my 2 bytes.

 

[Pixelated Taco]

I had a problem running with a 6800GT where it would overheat and cause the game to stutter. Slapped on a Zalman VGA cooler and the problem went away. Also wih the page file if you have 2 gigs of mem try to make the page file as small as you can. Around say 200MB and that's it. Try that setting and see if that helps if not, yes there might be a program leeching processing power.